China News Service, San Francisco, September 24. Researchers reported on the 23rd local time that fossil footprints found in New Mexico in the United States indicated that early humans had arrived in North America about 23,000 years ago.

  The New York Times reported that in 2009, David Bustos, the resource project manager of White Sands National Park in New Mexico, discovered these footprints for the first time on a dry lake bed in the park.

He brought in an international team of scientists to study these findings.

Over the years, together they have found thousands of human footprints on 80,000 acres of land in the park.

  The Associated Press reported that recently, scientists from the US Geological Survey analyzed the seeds left in the footprints to determine the approximate age of these footprints.

Scientists believe that these footprints were produced between 21130 and 22,800 years ago.

The National Broadcasting Corporation reported that Cornell University archaeologist Thomas Urban, a participant in the study, said that these footprints mixed with animal footprints indicate that people must have lived there for at least 2,000 years.

  A research article published in the journal Science on the 23rd stated that footprint fossils are more indisputable and more direct evidence than cultural relics, bones or other more conventional fossils.

The researcher said: "What we are showing here is evidence that can reflect a certain time and place."

  Based on its size, researchers believe that at least part of the footprints were left by children and adolescents who lived in the last ice age.

Bustos said these footprint fossils made of fine silt and clay are very fragile, so researchers must quickly collect samples.

  Earlier, during excavations in the White Sands National Park, researchers also found footprints fossils left by saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, Columbian mammoths and other ice age animals.

  The National Broadcasting Corporation reported that for a long time, people have been arguing whether humans arrived in the Americas from Siberia via the continental bridge before or after the "last glacial maximum" (the last glacial maximum in geological history).

For decades, many archaeologists have insisted that humans only spread out in the Americas at the end of the last ice age.

They pointed out that the oldest known tool in North America dates back about 13,000 years.

The main participant of the study, Professor Matthew Bennett of Environmental and Geographical Sciences at Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom, said that ancient footprints in the White Sands National Park indicate that humans may have reached the Americas 30,000 years ago, which is better than the last glacier. The peak of the times is thousands of years earlier.

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